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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26621773">Hope, or Something Like It</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/piratesPencil/pseuds/piratesPencil'>piratesPencil</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Overwatch (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Backstory, Domestic Fluff, Gunshot Wounds, Introspection, Junkrat's generally chaotic self, Kidnapping, M/M, Rescue, Roadhog's POV, hogdrogen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 06:27:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>11,705</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26621773</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/piratesPencil/pseuds/piratesPencil</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There was no hope in this wasteland.</i>
</p><p>Roadhog reflects on his past, his present, and the one thing he doesn't want to lose.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Junkrat | Jamison Fawkes/Roadhog | Mako Rutledge</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Tired</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He was tired. It seemed to Roadhog that he was always tired, that he had been tired for a very long time. Maybe there had never been a time when he wasn’t tired.</p><p>It was harder and harder to remember before. Before the ALF, before the Omnium explosion. When he was just Mako, just a kid. He wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe he’d been tired back then, too.</p><p>As a kid he’d had asthma. He remembered that. It wasn’t fun but it was manageable, and he was always big enough and scary enough that no one bothered him about it. He hadn’t even had to try to be scary. It was just the way he looked—he was huge, always big, even as a kid. His voice had always been low—though not always so damaged and raspy—and his face was rugged, perpetually scowling. He’d even tried to make himself less scary back then, had tried to speak softly and stand with a slouch that brought him a little closer to most people’s eye level.</p><p>Of course, it was a good thing he was so big, so scary. He would never have survived this long if he wasn’t. Other than his intimidating size, he just wasn’t made for the kind of tooth and nail survival that the irradiated land of Oz demanded of him.</p><p>He’d barely even been made to survive in the regular world, weak-lunged and sickly. After the Omnium explosion, the radiation and the disease and the incessant dust and heat had turned his asthma into a hacking, terrible thing, coughing up blood and struggling to breathe even as he ran through the wasteland and shot people in the head.</p><p>It got to a point where he had been sure he was going to die of it, just keel over in the middle of a fight, or worse, suffocate alone in some abandoned building as he struggled to sleep.</p><p>But he wasn’t good at dying—that was the other thing that had kept him alive this long. Even when he didn’t really want to, something inside him was always clawing its way forward, continuing to live, to <em>exist</em>, even as the world crumbled around him.</p><p>He’d been good at chemistry in high school, had enjoyed mixing chemicals and seeing something benign turn into something potent. Explosions, yes, but also medical stuff. In a different world, maybe he would have become a doctor, or a medical scientist, or a veterinarian—he’d always preferred animals to people.</p><p>But in this world, he sought out an old half-destroyed library and scoured it for chemistry textbooks and medical journals, and he looted drug stores and the science lab of an abandoned university, and he created hogdrogen.</p><p>It went through several iterations. Some left him so high and dazed that he sat for hours staring at the shifting colours on the ceiling and breathing in huge lungfuls of oxygen that filled his head with cotton. Others made his breathing worse, left him gasping and feverish, and most iterations did nothing at all.</p><p>Eventually, though, he had something that worked—like asthma medication but a hundred times more powerful, pumped with steroids and painkillers. The concoction would probably kill him eventually, but no more quickly than the radiation and his failing lungs. At least this way he could get through a fight without running out of air.</p><p>He made as many canisters of the stuff as he could carry on his bike, and kept the formula on him at all times. Whenever he came across an old drugstore or lab, he’d loot the place and make more. As time went on, it became harder to find places that hadn’t already been scavenged down to their bones, but he made do. Someday he’d run out, but he didn’t think about that.</p><p>That was the other trick to surviving in this wasteland. Don’t think ahead. Live one day at a time, one <em>moment</em> at a time. If you think about the future, you’ll lose yourself in hopelessness.</p><p>There was no hope in this wasteland.</p><p>And then he met Junkrat. The kid didn’t have hope, not exactly, but he had <em>energy</em>. It seemed like Junkrat was never tired, although Roadhog wasn’t sure the guy ever slept. He was a sparking, volatile wire, almost unbearably energetic. Just watching him frantically bounce around made Roadhog’s bones ache with exhaustion.</p><p>But it revitalized him, too. It didn’t happen overnight, but as a few tense weeks of traveling together became a few comfortable years, something shifted for Roadhog. It wasn’t just about surviving moment to moment anymore. He had goals. He had <em>dreams</em>.</p><p>Before Junkrat, it hadn’t ever really occurred to Roadhog to leave Oz. For one thing, it was his home. Not the place he’d been born (New Zealand seemed like it was seven lifetimes away), but the place where he’d built his own life, the place he’d defended tooth and nail as a member of the ALF. The place he deserved. He knew why Oz was the way it was. He knew the part he’d played in bringing about the apocalypse.</p><p>He could never fully repent, but the least he could do was stay in the wasteland he’d created.</p><p>But Junkrat didn’t have those ties. He’d grown up in the apocalypse. He didn’t feel loyal to this land. The only reason he hadn’t left yet was because he couldn’t. Some kid with no money, no ID and a mile-long criminal record couldn’t even leave the desert, let alone the continent.</p><p>But Junkrat knew, vaguely, that there was a world beyond Oz, and that people lived <em>well</em> in other parts of the world. He didn’t really know the specifics—he spoke of the world beyond the wasteland as an opulent place full of gold and luxury and extravagance, and in a way he wasn’t really wrong—but he knew that there was something better beyond this land.</p><p>And he dragged Roadhog into it. It took years to have the money, the plans, the opportunity to leave—but they did. As a young man, Roadhog had never been anywhere other than New Zealand and Australia, but he’d seen the world on TV, online. He knew what was out there. Junkrat hadn’t even had that. Every place they visited was like a new planet for Junkrat, full of wondrous and unbelievable things.</p><p>Of course, they took Oz with them when they left, brought the carnage and the destruction and the <em>fury</em> of the wasteland to every country they tore their way through. They weren’t refugees, they were criminals, international terrorists. They were born of a land abandoned to death and desolation, and the world would hear their screams.</p>
<hr/><p>“Come ooon, Roadie,” Junkrat whined. “Let’s go <em>do</em> something.”</p><p>Roadhog grunted. He lay on top of the thick, plush duvet that covered the hotel room’s king-sized bed, trying to nap. It was barely 5pm, but he hadn’t had a real night’s sleep in days. After a crime spree in Shanghai, they hadn’t stopped to sleep anywhere for days as they tore across China, Vietnam, Laos, finally stopping at an opulent hotel in Thailand.</p><p>“Trying to sleep, Rat,” Roadhog said. He rolled over and pulled the duvet with him, wrapping himself in the soft material.</p><p>“S’not even <em>dark</em> out,” Junkrat griped. Roadhog’s eyes were closed behind his mask, but he heard Junkrat clattering around the big hotel room, then heard a sound that was distinctly metal on glass.</p><p>Roadhog cracked one eye open to see Junkrat knocking on one of the tall, floor-to-ceiling windows with his metal hand—not quite hard enough to break the glass, but with a feverishness reminiscent of a dog clawing to get out of a cage.</p><p>“Calm down,” Roadhog ordered. Most of the time, Junkrat didn’t listen to Roadhog’s orders—except when they were in the heat of battle, and the adrenaline and high stakes of the moment meant that they responded to each other’s commands without hesitation—but sometimes Junkrat seemed to like Roadhog’s firm certainty, seemed to find it a reassuring anchor when his own brain was going in fifteen different directions.</p><p>This was not one of those times.</p><p>Junkrat groaned and knocked on the window harder. Roadhog saw him reaching for his frag launcher, and Roadhog snarled loud enough to make Junkrat jump and drop the gun.</p><p>“Come <em>on</em>, Roadie, you’re no fun,” Junkrat said. He finally left the window to come leap onto the bed next to Roadhog. He draped himself dramatically against Roadhog’s stomach and kicked his legs against the side of the bed.</p><p>“You should sleep too,” Roadhog said. He wrapped an arm firmly around Junkrat’s waist and pulled him against his chest, holding him tight enough that he hoped he wouldn’t wiggle around too much. Sometimes, if he could just get Junkrat lying down and quite for a minute, he’d conk out, the lack of sleep finally catching up with his hyperactive body.</p><p>No luck, though. Junkrat lay still against Roadhog for about thirty seconds, and then he was almost vibrating, rolling over one way and then the other. He pushed his face against Roadhog’s neck and peppered it with kisses, then nipped at it. Roadhog grunted and shoved Junkrat off the bed.</p><p>“Not in the mood,” Roadhog said. “I gotta sleep.”</p><p>Junkrat pouted. Roadhog rolled over so his back was to Junkrat, and he closed his eyes again. This was the one flaw in their partnership. They shared a ruthlessness and a passion and a love for gore and crime, they shared a partnership that had become a friendship and then something more (Roadhog didn’t think either of them were romantic enough to call it a <em>romance</em>, but something like that, just dirtier and rougher)—but Roadhog was just too <em>tired</em> to keep up with Junkrat.</p><p>A part of him, very deep down inside his core where the last threads of Mako still lived, was afraid that Junkrat would just get up and leave him one day, that Roadhog wouldn’t be able to keep up when Junkrat needed to get away.</p><p>For now, though, he didn’t have the energy to worry. He would sleep, and Junkrat would clatter around the room like a caged beast, and he’d hope that Junkrat would have the sense not to go anywhere without him. And when Roadhog woke up, he’d muster up enough energy to follow Junkrat out into the world again, and again, as long as he possibly could.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Groceries</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What’re ya doing?” Junkrat asked. He was draped over Roadhog’s shoulder, hanging off his back as he watched Roadhog scratching a pencil against loose paper.</p><p>“Making a list,” Roadhog said. He jerked his shoulder, trying to shake Junkrat off—the guy was thin as a twig but he was tall and he was <em>heavy</em>—but Junkrat just dug his hands firmly into the flesh of Roadhog’s upper arm and didn’t budge.</p><p>“What kinda list?”</p><p>“Groceries,” Roadhog said.</p><p>“<em>Groceries?</em>” Junkrat crowed. He let go of Roadhog then and tumbled dramatically to the floor of the house they were squatting in. They could afford the nicest hotels—maybe even a condo if they ever planned to stay in one place for long—but sometimes it was just easier to take over a place with no receptionist to hide from or bribe.</p><p>“This place has a working kitchen,” Roadhog said. He jerked his head towards the stove and fridge across the room. “Gonna cook.”</p><p>The place must not have been abandoned for long—maybe it was in the process of being sold—because it was clean and the amenities worked. It had been a very, very long time since Roadhog had been in a home like this. He’d been in hotels and motels and derelict houses and huts, but this place was a home. He could nearly see the 2.5 kids and the dog. It almost made him angry, how idyllic it was—but he didn’t quite have the energy to be properly mad, so instead he was nostalgic.</p><p>He’d enjoyed cooking, back when he was Mako. There was a time when he was a vegetarian, when he collected vegan cookbooks and made tofu bowls and eggless cookies for the people he’d called friends back then. He still refused to eat pork out of some absurd final tie to his past morals, but in the cut-throat desert, you couldn’t even dream of being vegetarian. Dietary restrictions were as much of a death sentence as everything else in the apocalypse.</p><p>He made the grocery list from memory, while Junkrat went around slamming drawers and cupboards open and shut. The place was devoid of furniture or cooking utensils—he added pots and knives and cutlery to the grocery list—but Junkrat seemed entranced by the house anyways.</p><p>If it had been years since Roadhog had been inside a home, it might have been a lifetime for Junkrat.</p><p>Junkrat was younger than Roadhog, sure—almost half his age. But most of the time, Junkrat seemed ageless—too ruthless and war-weary to be a kid, too clueless and enchanted to be an adult.</p><p>There were so many things Junkrat didn’t know. Not because he was young, but because he’d never gotten the chance to <em>be</em> young. He’d been five when the omnium exploded, and with his spotty memory, Junkrat couldn’t remember a thing about the days before the apocalypse. He was a child of dystopia. He didn’t know that cupboards could be filled with cans and bottles and jars and fresh produce, an endless supply of nourishment that went almost entirely unnoticed.</p><p>Without even knowing the wealth they were supposed to hold, Junkrat was entranced by empty cupboards.</p><p>“C’mon,” Roadhog said. He shoved the grocery list into his pocket and heaved himself to his feet. “Let’s get some groceries.”</p><p>“<em>Groceries</em>,” Junkrat repeated, rolling his eyes. He bounded across the kitchen and launched himself at Roadhog, leaped onto his back, his arms locked around Roadhog’s throat.</p><p>Roadhog grunted and flipped Junkrat off him, half out of annoyance and half out of reflex. Junkrat lay on the kitchen’s tile floor, dazed, and grinned up at Roadhog.</p><p>“What the fuck are groceries?” Junkrat asked.</p><hr/><p>They’d gotten good at disguises, or at least passable. It wasn’t that they were afraid of being caught—they relished in tearing apart police and vigilantes and bounty hunters, anyone who thought they could put an end to the junkers’ worldwide reign of terror or collect their impressively growing bounties.</p><p>But no one could. If Junkrat and Roadhog were so easily caught, they wouldn’t have made it this far. They weren’t subtle, didn’t hide. They stormed in and out with fanfare, with blood and guts and noise.</p><p>No, they didn’t do disguises because they were afraid, or because they needed to hide. They did disguises because sometimes you just want to buy some goddamn groceries without having to eviscerate any police officers, no matter how much you love eviscerating people.</p><p>So they’d gotten pretty okay at disguises. The key was not to try too hard. Trying too hard meant looking guilty, and looking guilty was worse than no disguise. Looking guilty was an admission that you had something to hide, something you felt bad about—Roadhog didn’t feel bad about a damn thing he’d done since he’d left Oz, since the world started caring about what they did.</p><p>He felt bad about a lot of stuff he’d done long before that, but the police weren’t after him for his real crimes, so he didn’t give a shit.</p><p>Before they left the house they were squatting in, Roadhog threw on a shirt that clung tightly to his belly but did enough to hide his tattoo, and replaced his leather mask with dark glasses and a bandana tied over his nose and mouth. Without the filters of his mask, the air bit at his damaged lungs, reminded him why he kept the mask on most of the time.</p><p>They’d make the shopping trip quick, and they wouldn’t do anything stupid while they were out, and Roadhog would probably be able to breathe enough to get back to the house alive.</p><p>“Don’t do any shit while we’re out,” he said, cuffing Junkrat on the side of the head before they stepped outside.</p><p>“Yeah, yeah,” Junkrat said, distracted. He’d thrown on a ratty hoodie that covered his tattoo and most of the garish orange of his prosthetic, but he’d left it unzipped out of some compulsion to always remain at least half undressed. He picked at the zipper with his metal fingers, clearly itching to take the thing off.</p><p>“C’mon,” Roadhog said. Then, because sometimes he did take pity on the guy, he added, “We’ll be quick.”</p><p>The word <em>quick</em> seemed to spark something in Junkrat, and his eyes lit up. He bounded after Roadhog and then passed him, racing ahead on the sidewalk of the painfully suburban neighbourhood they’d infiltrated.</p><p>“Quick, yeah,” Junkrat said. He was half-running and half-stumbling backwards down he sidewalk so he could look at Roadhog even as he raced ahead. “We could run, Roadie, that’d be fun. Be more quick.”</p><p>“Can’t,” Roadhog said. He’d never been particularly fast—too big, too heavy—and the worse his lungs got, the more he embraced moving slowly but steadily. Without his mask on, he couldn’t even jog if he wanted to.</p><p>Junkrat whined in the back of his throat, but eventually slowed down his frantic pace until he’d fallen back into step with Roadhog.</p><p>“Where are we even going?” he asked.</p><p>“Grocery store,” Roadhog answered. He’d seen one when they’d cruised into this neighbourhood the night before.</p><p>“Never been to one,” Junkrat said. “Can we blow it up when we leave?”</p><p>Roadhog grunted noncommittally. He didn’t really care if Junkrat blew up the store when they were done with it—fucking rich fuckers deserved to have the food they took for granted blown sky-high in his opinion—but he’d rather Junkrat didn’t blow it up until they were ready to leave this town. He didn’t want to have to find another store to stock up at if they decided to stick around for more than a couple days.</p><p>“We’ve been to grocery stores before,” Roadhog said.</p><p>Junkrat screwed up his face in confusion, as if he was thinking hard about whether that was true. Then he shook his head. “Don’t remember it.”</p><p>Roadhog shrugged. He was used to Junkrat’s holey memory, didn’t question what things he remembered and what he didn’t. In a lot of ways, Junkrat was smart, incredibly so—he was a genius with explosives and not a bad tactician, though he shared Roadhog’s philosophy of going in hard and loud and wild rather than carefully planning stealth missions. Junkrat could recite with photographic precision the chemical compounds that went into every explosive he carried on his person—which were many—but he often struggled to remember great stretches of time, entire weeks they’d spent together, or even his own name.</p><p>As he walked, Junkrat crossed his arms behind his head and stretched up to his full height, which was always slightly alarming to behold. He seemed to double in size when he wasn’t crouched over with a heavy tire perched on his back. The joints in his back popped with an ugly sound as he stretched out, then folded almost immediately back into a hunch. The hunch was his natural state, between the tire, the heavy unbalanced prosthetics, and years of malnutrition and bad posture.</p><p>Roadhog was not a nurturer. He was not soft, not gentle, not caring. Maybe he had been at some point, but a lifetime of violence and fury and fear had beaten that out of him. Still, sometimes, at the right moment, when Junkrat wasn’t annoying him or angering him, when he felt quiet and comfortable like this, seeing Junkrat’s skinny, twisted form stirred something inside of him. He wanted to gather Junkrat up in his arms and hold him, keep him out of sight from the world that had been trying its best for twenty-five years to tear this kid to pieces.</p><p>In a way, maybe that was a constant feeling, that deep-seated need to protect Junkrat. At some point, Roadhog had gone from being a bodyguard for pay to Junkrat’s protector out of choice. After the Omnium explosion, there hadn’t been much that Roadhog wanted to protect—there was nothing left worth protecting. Not until he met Junkrat, and the skinny little demon had wormed his way past all of Roadhog’s carefully built defenses.</p><p>“Holy <em>shit</em>, Roadie, look at this thing!”</p><p>Junkrat was standing next to a garbage can around the side of someone’s house—he’d slipped over there so quickly that Roadhog hadn’t even noticed him leave—and he held an enormously fat rat in one hand, dangling it by its ropey tail.</p><p>“He’s fucking huge,” Junkrat said in awe.</p><p>“Put it down,” Roadhog said. “And get out of their yard.”</p><p>Junkrat bounded away from the garbage cans and rejoined Roadhog on the sidewalk, but he didn’t put down the rat. He transferred it from one hand to the other, holding it away from himself as it flailed angrily, trying to bite at Junkrat’s arm and hand.</p><p>“What are you going to do with that?” Roadhog grunted.</p><p>“Gonna eat it,” Junkrat said. He dangled the fat thing above his mouth as if he was about to drop it in whole, angry and snarling and completely alive. Knowing Junkrat, Roadhog wouldn’t have been surprised if he did tear into the rat alive.</p><p>“Don’t,” Roadhog said. He slapped the rat out of Junkrat’s hand and it fell to the sidewalk, lying prone and dazed for a few seconds.</p><p>“Hey!” Junkrat reached down and scooped the rat up again before it had a chance to skitter away.</p><p>“Don’t need to eat those here,” Roadhog said. “We’re getting groceries.”</p><p>“Ah. Forgot,” Junkrat said, and contemplated the angry rat. “Gonna keep it as a pet, then.”</p><p>Roadhog rolled his eyes. Junkrat had tried many, many times to keep a pet, and he had always ended up losing, killing, or just straight up eating the thing. But they weren’t in the wastelands anymore. Maybe this time would be different.</p><p>Probably not.</p><p>“Just don’t let it bite you. Might be rabid,” Roadhog said. He looked over to see that the rat already had its teeth clamped firmly around one of the fingers of Junkrat’s flesh hand, and Junkrat was laughing as blood beaded around the sharp little teeth. “Never mind.”</p><p>If he thought he could hold Junkrat down long enough to do it, he’d go get Junkrat his shots, tetanus and rabies and whatever else he’d missed out on as a kid. He’d survived this long without them, though, and the radiation poisoning and whatever else was wrong with him would probably kill Junkrat early anyways.</p><p>The thought made Roadhog queasy. He looked away, let Junkrat keep playing with the fat rodent as they walked.</p><p>They were both dying. Slowly, from the radiation, and quickly, every time they jumped into battle, an endless wager, your life for your freedom, and every time they came out alive, their odds of getting lucky one more time seemed to shrink. The most Roadhog could hope for was that he’d go first—that he’d die as Junkrat’s shield, or that his shit lungs would take him out before a lifetime of poison took Junkrat out first.</p><p>Roadhog had already lost everything once. He wouldn’t quite admit it—not out loud, not even to himself, really—but he couldn’t lose Junkrat. He couldn’t lose everything he had a second time. Mako couldn’t. Mako, who was already almost gone, just a shadow somewhere deep in Roadhog’s brain, would die with Junkrat, even if Roadhog lived on.</p><p>“Hey, that’s the place, right?” Junkrat said. He waved towards the small corner store market ahead of them, the rat held firmly in his other hand. “I remember groceries now.”</p><p>“Yeah,” Roadhog said. He glanced down at Junkrat’s rat. “Gotta hide that thing. Not supposed to bring it inside.”</p><p>Junkrat nodded. “Got it, mate. Good at hiding shit.”</p><p>There were a lot of things that Junkrat wasn’t good at, but hiding things was one thing he could do shockingly well. One of the many skills that had kept him alive this long, despite all odds.</p><p>He slipped the rat into the right pocket of his hoodie and shoved his prosthetic hand in after it, holding the rat against his side and hiding the distinctive orange metal of his hand. Roadhog nodded his approval and led Junkrat into the store.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Suburbia</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was, of course, too much to ask to expect Junkrat not to pull any stupid shit while they were in the grocery store—though he did keep the rat hidden the whole time. Roadhog would give him that.</p><p>He was about halfway through his grocery list when he realized that Junkrat wasn’t beside him anymore, which sent a spike of fear down his spine. Not because he feared for Junkrat’s safety—there was no one who could even come close to being a threat in this sleepy suburban grocery store—but because he feared the havoc Junkrat could wreak. And Roadhog really wasn’t in the mood for havoc. Was it so wrong to want to cook dinner instead of commit murder, just for one night?</p><p>He dropped the bag of egg noodles into his shopping basket and went tromping back up the aisle, hoping Junkrat was just around the corner. It wasn’t a big grocery store, more of a neighbourhood convenience store than anything. It shouldn’t have been hard to find the kid.</p><p>And it wasn’t too hard to find him, but it was already too late when he did.</p><p>Junkrat was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the snack aisle, at least seven open bags of chips littering the floor around him, as if he’d sampled and discarded each one. As far as Junkrat’s crimes went, this was absolutely not the worst.</p><p>Unfortunately, an employee had rounded the corner of the aisle at almost the exact same moment as Roadhog, and had taken in the same sight, as Junkrat grabbed another bag of chips off the shelf and ripped it open with his teeth. And this wouldn’t have been so bad either—Roadhog could have talked them out of it, he’d done it before—but before Roadhog had a chance to say anything, Junkrat had whipped a knife of out his pocket.</p><p>It wasn’t a pocket knife, either. This was a real knife, rusted but sharp, something that Junkrat had been toting around since Australia. As much as Roadhog tried to keep track of Junkrat, he’d been perpetually unable to keep stock of all the weapons Junkrat kept on his person. There were always more than Roadhog expected, even beyond the infinite supply of explosives.</p><p>Junkrat held the bag of chips in his mouth, dangling between his bared teeth. He held the knife towards the employee with his left hand, solid and threatening even though he was still sitting on the floor. His right hand remained firmly in his pocket, though, still holding onto the rat.</p><p>The employee screamed, and stumbled backwards into the shelves. A jar of salsa shattered on the floor and the employee jerked away from it.</p><p>Then he seemed to decide that he was going to be tough, and he took a step towards Junkrat, hands waving wildly, and started shouting in a language that Roadhog didn’t know and didn't care enough to identify.</p><p>And of course Junkrat leapt to his feet—always surprisingly agile despite his crooked spine and missing limbs—and shoved the knife against the side of the employee’s neck.</p><p>The employee’s angry shouts faded to soft pleas.</p><p>“Enough,” Roadhog said. He grabbed Junkrat by the back of his hoodie and yanked him away from the guy, hard and fast. “Told you not to fuck shit up.”</p><p>“It was self defense,” Junkrat said. He kicked in Roadhog’s grasp, and Roadhog dropped him heavily to the floor. He landed in a deep crouch, then sprang back up, knife still out.</p><p>“Self defense.” Roadhog snorted. “Guy wasn’t doing anything.”</p><p>The employee had stumbled to his knees in front of Roadhog and was shaking, rapid foreign words spilling from his lips. He seemed to be thanking Roadhog, showering him with appreciation.</p><p>Roadhog reached down, wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the man’s head, and jerked it sharply to the side. The man didn’t even have a chance to yell. He fell limp to the floor, neck snapped.</p><p>“Look what you made me do,” Roadhog said. He kicked the man’s body against the shelves. “Now we gotta clean up the witnesses.”</p><p>Junkrat stared at the limp body for a few moments. Then manic laughter bubbled past his lips. He shoved the rusted knife back into his pocket and pulled out two grenades.</p><p>“Gotta clean up the whole store now, eh Hog?” he said. He was jittering from foot to foot, endless pent up energy.</p><p>Roadhog grunted. He’d wanted to avoid this. He hadn’t even gotten all his groceries yet. But at this point, it was better to be safe than sorry.</p><p>Besides, Junkrat was already lobbing both grenades high into the air, and they had to be out the door before they hit the ground.</p>
<hr/><p>Halfway down the block, and the corner store was already a blackened shell, a hole of flames and corpses. Roadhog was doubled over, leaning against the side of a blue clapboard house, unable to catch his breath as he listened to Junkrat cackle over the sparks and flames that filled the neighbourhood with acrid smoke.</p><p>Roadhog’s vision swam. He’d left his gasmask back at the house with the rest of their crap like an idiot. The lull of suburbia had made him complacent, had made him think he’d be okay without it for a few minutes. Normally he was smarter than this—wouldn’t let them leave their stuff behind, especially not something as important as his mask and his stash of hogdrogen.</p><p>“Y’all right, Roadie?” Junkrat’s voice sounded far away. Roadhog couldn’t stop coughing, couldn’t draw in a full breath. His lungs burned.</p><p>“Hey. I’m gonna—I’ll get the hogdrogen. I—I dunno where the house is, but I’ll find it, okay? I’ll—”</p><p>Roadhog slammed his hand over Junkrat’s mouth, cutting off his manic rambling.</p><p>“M’fine,” he hacked out between short breaths. He pushed away from the house he was leaning against. He teetered and leaned heavily against Junkrat, who nearly folded under his weight. But between Junkrat’s wiry strength and Roadhog’s stumbling steps, they got away from the burning convenience store before any cops showed up.</p><p>Once they’d gotten a ways away from the acrid smoke of the explosion, Roadhog’s breaths came slightly easier, but he still felt as though his lungs were trying to crawl right out of his throat, still couldn’t draw a full breath. Junkrat was prattling nervously, hands dancing along Roadhog’s side and back as he supported him.</p><p>Usually, Roadhog could handle the smoke and debris from Junkrat’s explosions. His mask filtered out the worst of it, and he never went into battle without taking a hit of hogdrogen first. This was worse than usual, though, even without the mask. Something like fear clawed inside Roadhog’s chest, made it even harder to breathe. There had been a time when Roadhog didn’t fear death at all, sometimes almost teetered into wishing for it. But now he had a jittery, soot-covered reason to live, and it sent a sort of panic coursing under his skin to think that he was getting worse, sicker every day.</p>
<hr/><p>Their stuff was untouched when they got back to their squatting house. Roadhog fell heavily to his knees and tore off the bandana, pressed his mask to his face and fit a hogdrogen can against one of the filters, sucked in shallow breaths that slowly deepened as the gas numbed his lungs.</p><p>Junkrat sat on the floor beside him, hovering, hands jittering. When Roadhog could breathe enough to focus on him, he looked down and saw that Junkrat’s right pocket, zipped shut, was convulsing wildly. The rat was still trapped inside, fighting against the thick fabric prison.</p><p>“Your pet’s gonna suffocate,” Roadhog said. His voice was rougher than usual, and he almost started coughing again. He sucked in more hogdrogen and leaned back against the beige living room wall.</p><p>Junkrat looked down at his pocket as if he’d forgotten the rat was even there. He unzipped it and pulled the rat out, holding it firmly in his right hand as it squirmed and squealed.</p><p>“Roadie almost choked to death,” Junkrat told the rat, looking at it snarling little face. “Wouldn’t want you to die, either.”</p><p>Roadhog huffed a laugh. “M’not that easy to kill,” he said, although he wasn’t sure how true that was anymore.</p><p>Junkrat seemed satisfied now that Roadhog wasn’t going to keel over, so he wandered away, giving the rat some kind of house tour. Roadhog, still parked on the living room floor and absolutely too tired to get up, sifted through the one grocery bag he’d kept with him as they escaped the convenience store. It didn’t have half the stuff he’d wanted, but it was enough.</p><p>He rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes. He’d make food later. Right now, he’d appreciate the simple feeling of breathing, and the momentary semblance of quiet—the fact that he couldn’t hear Junkrat crashing around the house was probably a bad sign, but he’d take it for now.</p><p>He dozed off easily. The lull of suburbia still had its claws in him, and he slept far more soundly than was safe.</p>
<hr/><p>“Roadie, Roadie, Roadie, Roadie—”</p><p>“Shut the fuck up,” Roadhog grunted. He didn’t open his eyes, but he could feel Junkrat jittering beside him, hear the clank of all his metal bits and smell the overpowering scent of smoke and gunpowder that pierced even the heavy filters of Roadhog’s mask.</p><p>“<em>Roadie</em>,” Junkrat repeated, drawing the word out like a whine.</p><p>Finally, Roadhog cracked one eye open. Junkrat stood in front of him, holding a large metal cage with a very angry rat inside.</p><p>“Where’d you find that?” Roadhog asked.</p><p>“Basement,” Junkrat said. He pointed at the floor, as if he wanted to make sure Roadhog knew what a basement was. “S’full of stuff. Could fill this whole place with stuff. Just move right in, make it ours, paint out names on the lil mailbox out front. You seen people do that? Paint their names on the mailbox? That mean they own the house, or just the mailbox?”</p><p>“Full a stuff?” Roadhog asked. He was starting to wonder if this place was properly abandoned. The place was overgrown, no cars in the driveway, emptied out, not even a for sale sign out front. But it still had power and water and basement full of stuff…</p><p>Roadhog shook off the grogginess of sleep. He couldn’t keep letting his guard down. Not that anyone who lived here would be a real threat to them, but it he never liked to be caught off guard.</p><p>“Y’wanna come look?” Junkrat asked. He put the cage down on the floor and patted it like it was the top of a dog’s head.</p><p>“Hm.” Roadhog hauled himself to his feet. Judging by the dusky darkness through the windows, he’d been sleeping for hours, but he still felt mostly exhausted. Attacks always tended to sap what little energy he had. “Y’think they got pots’n pans down there?”</p><p>Junkrat nodded enthusiastically. “Pro’bly. They got everything. S’like a goddamn box store down there.”</p><p>Roadhog blinked. “Y’know what a box store is?”</p><p>“We’ve robbed like five,” Junkrat said. “M’not stupid.”</p><p>“’Course not,” Roadhog said, and he meant it. He’d gotten so used to Junkrat’s paper thin memory that he was surprised whenever the kid did remember stuff, but he knew he wasn’t stupid. If anything he was a genius, doing all the things he did with a brain so thoroughly fried by radiation.</p><p>He followed Junkrat down into the basement, ready to stock up and make the kid a proper meal.</p>
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<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Pork</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Roadhog woke up with a deeply unsettled feeling laying heavy in his chest. At first he thought he’d fallen asleep with his mask off and he was choking. But no. The mask was in place, his breathing as even and steady as it ever was.</p><p>It was fear, he realized, sitting up quickly. Years in the Outback meant that he could wake up instantly when he needed to, and the heavy fear that had washed over him as he woke up was enough to make him know he needed to.</p><p>He reached across the mattress they’d hauled upstairs, feeling around for Junkrat in the dark, trying to shake him awake so they’d both be alert if there was any reason for Roadhog’s sudden panic. But Junkrat wasn’t there. Not on the bed, and Roadhog couldn’t hear him anywhere in the room.</p><p>He grabbed the burner phone they’d picked up a few days ago and thumbed on the flashlight, letting dim blue light wash over the mostly empty master bedroom. Empty. Junkrat had wanted to keep the caged rat in the room with him, but Roadhog had refused. Rodents were nocturnal, and he didn’t want the thing clanking around in its cage all night, keeping them up.</p><p>Junkrat had probably gone to see the rat in the other room. Or to build bombs, or to eat whatever leftovers they hadn’t scarfed down at dinner, or just to pace the halls and release some of the endless electric energy that coursed through his veins. It wasn’t at all unusual for Junkrat to be prowling around all night. He was almost nocturnal himself.</p><p>Normally, Roadhog would have gone back to sleep. He was Junkrat’s bodyguard, but Junkrat wasn’t stupid. He’d survived on his own for decades, and he needed Roadhog to look out for him in a fight, not to babysit him through the night.</p><p>But that heavy unease, that eerie foreboding that squeezed inside Roadhog’s chest hadn’t gone away. He wasn’t sure if he believed in psychics or premonitions or any of that shit, but he’d learned to trust gut instincts. Instincts kept you alive better than any plans, any alliances, any brute strength. And his instincts were telling him to be wary, and to be afraid.</p><p>He got out of bed. Flipped on the bedroom light and then the hall light as he made his way through the house. Flooded the whole place with light, because although sometimes darkness could work to your advantage, Roadhog wanted to see everything, wanted to be alert. He’d let his guard down too much lately—being away from Oz for so long had softened him, and the calm times they spent between heists dulled the edges of his vigilance. He didn’t want to be caught tonight, not when his heart was hammering deep in his chest.</p><p>The rat was still in its cage on the living room floor, gnawing on the metal bars. No Junkrat, though. He wasn’t in the packed basement, he wasn’t digging through the fridge. Roadhog checked every bathroom, every closet. He went outside and stood in the backyard, gazed up at the roof bathed in blue moonlight, tried to find Junkrat perched on the dark shingles.</p><p>It took Roadhog about half an hour of scouring to realize that Junkrat wasn’t anywhere.</p><p>The heavy tightness in his chest hadn’t gone away. It grew, threatened to choke him. It wasn’t like Junkrat to go anywhere without Roadhog, not in the middle of the night, not without warning him. They’d probably reached a sort of codependency that was unhealthy at this point, but there wasn’t much that was healthy about them anyways.</p><p>Junkrat didn’t go anywhere without Roadhog. He just didn’t.</p><p>The rat was screeching in its cage. Roadhog’s hands were tight fists. He kicked at the cage hard enough to flip it onto its side. The rat squealed.</p><p>“Fuck,” Roadhog grunted.</p><p>Over the years they’d spent together in Oz, Roadhog had never lost Junkrat.</p><p>It seemed like everyone in the Outback was after Junkrat—the kid was famous in the apocalyptic wasteland. He’d almost reached a kind of mythic status. People talked about Junkrat’s treasure like something out of a fairytale—the theories about what the treasure was ranged from mundane masses of money to absurd promises of world-ending weapons and magic powers.</p><p>Every story agreed, though—if you could get your hands on the treasure, your life would be forever changed. Wealth and power and renown would be yours. The desperation with which everyone tried to get to Junkrat just made the pull of the treasure stronger. Everyone wanted it. Everyone wanted Junkrat.</p><p>And for years, Roadhog had stood staunchly between Junkrat and everyone who wanted to get to him. Before Junkrat had hired Roadhog, the kid had been kidnapped and tortured countless times. He hadn’t told Roadhog everything—seemed like he’d forgotten half of it and didn’t care enough about the rest to talk about it properly—but Roadhog had figured out enough to know. And he’d made a promise to Junkrat, even before Junkrat had become the centre of his shitty broken world—no one would ever get their hands on Junkrat again, not as long as Roadhog lived.</p><p>And he’d kept that promise through the price of blood and bone and carnage. Once Roadhog had started working for Junkrat, no one had laid a hand on the guy. Junkrat could hold his own enough to survive torture and escape kidnapping, but the two of them working together was a force strong enough to prevent that from ever happening again.</p><p>But now. Now, in this stupid suburban neighbourhood that felt so safe it was almost frightening, Roadhog had lost Junkrat. What an apocalyptic wasteland couldn’t manage, the veneer of suburbia had accomplished in one night.</p><p>Roadhog screamed. He punched the living room wall hard enough to leave a crater in the plaster, and then he did it again, and then he gathered up all their shit strewn around the house and threw it in the sidecar of the bike they’d parked in the two-car garage.</p><p>He didn’t know for sure that Junkrat had been kidnapped. The kid could have wandered away somewhere like an idiot, and he’d be back by daybreak with his dumb smile and jittery hands. Or he could have been killed, picked off when he went outside to take a leak behind a tree because he still didn’t trust toilets that much.</p><p>But Roadhog trusted his instincts, and the heaviness in his chest whispered truths to him. Junkrat was alive—somehow he thought he’d know if Junkrat was dead, that there would be a hollowness so profound inside him if Junkrat stopped existing that he’d <em>know</em>—but he wasn’t safe. There was too much fear in Roadhog’s lungs.</p><p>He dumped the leftovers from last night’s meal into the sidecar. The sight of them made him angry—hours ago they’d made dinner like some kind of carefree domestic shitheads, and now he was going to have to go roaring across the country to tear out someone’s throat for even thinking of touching Junkrat. But he’d spent enough time starving to know that you didn’t leave food behind, even if it pissed you off.</p><p>He stormed through the house one last time, just in case he’d missed Junkrat—not that the guy was easy to miss, be sometimes he could surprise you.</p><p>No sign of him.</p><p>Roadhog would stay until daybreak. If Junkrat wasn’t back by sunrise, he’d know the kid was gone for good—whether he’d been kidnapped or killed or just gotten lost. He’d head out and look for him, trust his instincts because there wasn’t a goddamn clue in this place, not even a busted lock.</p><p>He crossed the living room to go wait out the rest of the night by his bike, because he didn’t want to let his shit out of his sight anymore. The rat was still scuttling around the knocked over cage, loud and angry. He left it there. Didn’t need a fucking dirty rat with him.</p><p>Daybreak came, and Junkrat was still gone. Sunlight filtered through the windows high up the garage walls, and Roadhog got ready to leave. This house made him feel sick.</p><p>He almost left without the rat. Very nearly left it there to starve inside the metal cage.</p><p>And then, because he was soft and weak and didn’t want to be alone and didn’t want to abandon something Junkrat loved, he went back inside and grabbed the cage and tossed it into the sidecar with the rest of their stuff.</p><hr/><p>The sky was light but the neighbourhood was still and quiet. Suburbia didn’t wake up this early. The thrum of Roadhog’s bike cut loud and angry through the stillness and he relished at the thought of comfortable husbands and comfortable wives startling out of their comfortable beds as he tore past their perfect houses.</p><p>When he stopped at corners and traffic lights (not that he cared, not that he was one to obey traffic laws, but he was looking for Junkrat and he didn’t need asshole cops on his tail), he could hear the rat scratching and screeching in his cage. It occurred to Roadhog that the thing probably hadn’t eaten since Junkrat had scooped it out of a trash can, and eventually he tossed chunks of leftover cheese and bread into the cage.</p><p>“Gonna have to name you something,” he said.</p><p>He was on the highway now, no slowing down, the roar of his bike too loud to even hear himself. He almost laughed, though—Roadhog wasn’t a talker. Mako had never been particularly chatty and he’d only gotten worse as he’d shaped the gruff and stoic persona of Roadhog, found that people were more scared of you when you said nothing at all.</p><p>But Junkrat had weaselled words out of Roadhog the way he’d weaselled everything out of him, and now Roadhog was so used to silences being filled with words that he was talking to a fucking rat.</p><p>He named the rat Pork, because it was fat and because there was something perfectly ironic about a rat named after a pig.</p><p>“You ready for carnage, Pork?” he asked. Because that was what was coming—wherever Junkrat was, Roadhog was going to rain the worst kind of fury down on it.</p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Hogtied</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Junkrat was fifteen when he blew his own limbs off. Or somewhere close to fifteen—numbers like that tended to escape him. He wasn’t even entirely sure that he was twenty-five now, except that it kind of sounded right, and that was really the best he had to go on.</p><p>He hadn’t found his treasure yet when he blew his limbs off, though. He was sure of that. He wasn’t anyone yet, not until he found the secret in the omnium core. Once he had his treasure, he was someone—a name people recognized, a name equal parts feared and hunted. Before that, though, he wasn’t even really a person. Junkrat wasn’t even really a name. More of a title. An accusation.</p><p>There were a lot of kids who lived in the junkyards—orphans and beggars. They were good places to be. If you could scavenge good scrap, you could sell it or trade it to the gangs that came through, and they’d use it to fix up their bikes and their cars, to make weapons and tools and bombs. Junkrat was a shit scavenger, though—he kept too much scrap for himself, learned how to make his own weapons and bombs and didn’t sell them to the gangs. He hoarded stuff, squirrelled it away where the other junkrats couldn’t find it, and they all hated him for it.</p><p>It was a good thing that <em>he</em> found the treasure, when he did find it, a few years after he left the junkyards. Any of those other kids would’ve sold that treasure for a good meal and a jacket. Only he knew that treasure was worth hoarding, and that it was worth more when you hoarded it. People traded away garbage. They kept treasures.</p><p>Everything Junkrat owned was a treasure. And it was his, and he wouldn’t share it, and he’d blow up any fucker that tried to touch his shit.</p><p>He hadn’t been doing anything all that impressive when he blew himself apart. Wasn’t defending his treasures or himself. He was just messing around, blowing shit up for the fun of it, to see the heat and the flames and the destruction. These were bigger bombs than he usually worked with. He wasn’t all there in the head, but he was smart—smart enough to know he was crazy, and smart enough not to waste all his resources on bombs he didn’t need. So he kept them small, usually, hoarded up supplies for big ones in case he ever needed them.</p><p>But he was restless sometimes, and he had to test the big ones, couldn’t trust that they’d work when he needed them to just because the small ones worked. And he’d had bad shit happen with the small ones before—he’d blow two fingers off his right hand already, burned up his whole left thigh, blown out most of the hearing in both ears.</p><p>He wasn’t even surprised, not really, when the big bombs went off right beside him, before they were supposed to go off, before he even got a chance to leap for cover. He’d almost expected it—maybe even planned for it. He couldn’t remember even at the time what he’d really intended, because sometimes the restlessness inside him was so eager and jumpy to get out that it needed the thrill of pain and blood and seared flesh to be satisfied.</p><p>He lay in the junkyard, alone in the scrapheap that he’d laid claim to, that no one else dared touch, and he laughed his fucking head off as he bled out. He remembered that. Didn’t remember much of what came after, but he knew he must have dragged himself to his little stash of supplies, tied off the bloodied stumps with one hand and lived on sheer insanity alone.</p><p>He remembered the explosion, and the pain, and the laughing though. Because it was fucking <em>funny</em>, it really was, that he’d blown chunks of himself clean away with his own bombs. It felt downright <em>poetic</em>, and sometimes he told Roadie about it, about how he thought the universe was trying to tell him something when he blew himself up, if only he could understand it.</p><p>Roadhog didn’t say much, and he was especially quiet when Junkrat talked about all the ways he’d hurt himself, sometimes by accident and more often on purpose. Roadie didn’t see the humour in it, didn’t think it was funny that the mad kid with the bombs was just as likely to blow himself to shit as he was to blow anyone else up.</p><p>Roadie was right a lot of the time, though, so sometimes Junkrat thought maybe Roadie was right that it wasn’t funny. If it wasn’t funny, though, it would be tragic, and that sounded awful. So it was funny. Junkrat had decided that long ago.</p><p>Just like it was funny, now, that Junkrat was tied up like a hog (hog, Roadhog—see? fucking hilarious) in the back of a limousine. It was the funniest thing in the world—after years of being hunted in the Outback by the bloodthirstiest motherfuckers on earth, he got caught <em>here</em>, in this little picket fence neighbourhood that Roadhog called suburbia.</p><p>Junkrat had no idea who these fuckers were. He’d woken up in the middle of the night, tucked up against Roadie’s side on the floor of what Roadhog had called the Master bedroom. He’d wiggled out from under one of Roadie’s huge arms and slunk outside to take a leak. There was a perfectly good bathroom attached to the bedroom, but when Roadie had taken a look at it before they crashed, he’d mentioned that they should take advantage of the huge soaker tub that took up half the space, and the threat of bathing alone was enough to spook Junkrat out of wanting to use the room.</p><p>Besides, pissing outside just felt right.</p><p>He was pulling his shorts back up over his hips when he felt the sting.</p><p>At first he thought it was a wasp. He slapped his hand against his neck, expecting to come away with the squished corpse of a bug. Instead his hand hit something small and hard, and he was already stumbling to his knees by the time he realized what it was. A tranq dart. He’d been hit by them before—they weren’t all that uncommon in the Outback, a popular tool for bounty hunters who needed their targets alive. He’d been prepared back then, though. He’d <em>expected</em> to be hunted, and he’d had Roadie watching his back, ready to catch him before he fell, ready to rain bloody hell down on whoever thought they could take Junkrat, dead <em>or </em>alive.</p><p>But Roadie wasn’t here now. Roadie was upstairs, in the Master bedroom, whatever the fuck that meant, sleeping peaceful in the kind of nice house he deserved.</p><p>That was Junkrat’s last thought, before he succumbed to the tranquilizer. He was glad that Roadie was sleeping so good in such a nice place. He deserved it.</p><p><em>Weird thought,</em> he said to himself, and then he was swimming in darkness.</p><hr/><p>So he didn’t get a look at the guys who took him. By the time the tranq wore off, he was hogtied (ha, still funny) in the back of a limo. He was pretty sure it was a limo, anyways. The trunk was flat but long, longer than a normal car’s trunk, and it smelled nice. Like cologne and champagne and other fancy shit that Junkrat knew about because he and Roadie were living the high life now, stealing from the rich and giving to the richer—the richer being themselves, of course.</p><p>Maybe it was just a nice car with a big trunk. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that Junkrat didn’t have a way out.</p><p>He’d gone outside in nothing but his shorts, not a single bomb on his person, because—what had Roadie said?—suburbia felt safe. It had felt nice to sleep on a mattress with Roadie and not worry about where their weapons were stashed because they weren’t gonna <em>need</em> those weapons.</p><p>Fuck, he wanted a weapon right now.</p><p>At least he had his arm and his leg, metal sharp and jagged enough in places to be something like a weapon. If he twisted his wrist just right, wiggled it around a little, he could start wearing away at the ropes that were keeping his arms tight against his back.</p><p>He worked at that for a little while, fell into a rhythm as the limo kept rolling steadily down whatever road it was rolling down. He could hear the occasional rush of an oncoming car outside, the rumble of the road beneath them, but not enough engines roaring and horns honking to be anywhere in the city. Maybe they were on some desolate highway. Not bumpy enough to be an unpaved backroad or anything like that.</p><p>He wasn’t making any progress on the ropes. What the fuck were these things made out of? What kind of fancy unbreakable ropes did they have out here? He’d kill for some good old fashioned Outback ropes right about now.</p><p>And then the limo slid to a screeching stop. The force of it sent him tumbling into the back of the trunk, his head <em>thwacking</em> against the side of it. Fuck. What was going on?</p><p>He heard gunshots then, the <em>pop</em> of a handgun and then the <em>rattattat</em> of something bigger.</p><p>Junkrat was almost foaming at the mouth. He wanted to be <em>out there</em>, in the action, wanted to be smelling the gunpowder and <em>feeling</em> the bang of those gunshots, not tied up back here like a prize to be won.</p><p>And then he heard a sound that made him sit bolt upright in the back of the limousine. Or at least, he tried to, but he was still tied up and there wasn’t close to enough headroom in here, so he mostly managed to slam his head against the top of the trunk.</p><p>But it didn’t matter, because he heard the crunch and the clank and the metallic <em>bam</em> of a gun he knew as well as his own heartbeat.</p><p>Roadie was here.</p>
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<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Gunshot</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>At first, Roadhog wasn’t sure that he was on the right track.</p><p>He didn’t have much to go on. Not anything, really. Just instinct, making turns when it felt right. Took him at least half an hour to realize where he was headed—the Australian embassy. It’s where he’d be headed, if he’d picked up the Outback’s most wanted man. Get Junkrat deported back to Oz, force him to give up his treasure there.</p><p>Sure, whoever had taken Junkrat might have just killed him. Not everyone believed in his treasure, or that they needed him alive to find it. They could be taking him to an airport, too, if whoever had taken him was too unsavory to be able to show their face at an embassy. Or they could be taking him to their boss, if they were just underlings, and a boss could be anywhere.</p><p>And, of course, there was the possibility that Junkrat hadn’t been taken at all. That he’d just left on his own. Honestly, most days, Roadhog was surprised that Junkrat hadn’t left him years ago.</p><p>“Would you shut the <em>fuck</em> up,” he growled, reaching into the sidecar to rattle Pork’s cage. The rat had been squeaking and scrabbling around in there for hours now, and the sound was starting to drive Roadhog mad. He was seriously regretting taking the vermin along, and he was seconds away from chucking the thing off the sidecar when he noticed the limo.</p><p>It was sleek and immaculately clean, and there was absolutely no reason for something as fancy as this thing to be cruising down a near-empty highway at half past nine in the morning. This was the kind of ride you found in the big city, carrying celebrities from one star-studded event to another, not the kind of ride you found out here.</p><p>And it was only a half hour away from the embassy.</p><p>That was all Roadhog had to go on, really. But the thought that this could be it—that this felt like <em>it</em>, the thing he was supposed to be chasing—was enough of a distraction that he didn’t care if Pork kept rattling around in there.</p><p>Junkrat could deal with his pet when he found him.</p><p>For a minute he debated whether he should follow the limo for a bit, see where it ended up, if the people driving it did anything suspicious. And then he thought <em>fuck it</em>. Either Junkrat was in this limo, or some rich assholes who deserved to get the crap scared out of them a little were in there. Win win.</p><p>So Roadhog fished a can of hogdrogen out of the sidecar, took a long pull of it, and then sent his bike screeching towards the limo.</p><p>He cut it off easily, forcing it to scream to a stop. He barely had time to reach for his gun before two men in dark suits and Kevlar vests were hopping out of the limo, guns blazing.</p><p>Roadhog grinned hugely behind his mask. Bingo.</p><p>One of the men had a handgun, and Roadhog didn’t even bother to shoot the guy. He lumbered off his bike, took two heavy steps towards the man, and tossed out his hook. It grabbed the guy around the middle with a satisfying weight, and Roadhog pulled him in like fish on a line. He slammed the side of his gun into the guy’s head, felt the <em>crunch</em> of his skull caving in, and let the guy drop to the road without a second glance.</p><p>The other guy had some kind of machine gun rig, clunky and clearly customized. It almost looked like something ripped off an old Bastion unit. It took the guy a second to get it set up, and by the time he was shooting it, Roadhog had already dealt with handgun guy.</p><p>He wasn’t quite quick enough, though. He felt the heavy impact, the blazing hot tear of a bullet in his shoulder before he had a chance to load his scrap gun. That’s as good as the guy got, though, because two clanking metal shots of the scrap gun later, the guy was bleeding out on the asphalt next to his Bastion gun.</p><p>“Fuck,” Roadhog grunted through gritted teeth, pressing a hand to his ruined shoulder. This wasn’t even close to the first time he’d been shot, but it sucked every time. Usually he was quicker than this, but usually he had Junkrat watching his back. He was supposed to be Junrkat’s bodyguard, but at some point, Junkrat had also become his.</p><p>His wound didn’t matter right now, though. He could feel warm blood oozing between his fingers and down his arm. He kept a grip on his scrap gun, just in case there were more guys, but it looked like it was just the two of them. Panting a little behind his mask, he made his way around the side of the limo. The back windows were tinted, but he didn’t bother checking back there. Instinct took over again, and Roadhog’s instincts had always been good.</p><p>He reached the trunk, and now he could hear a faint banging from in there. It was muffled, almost imperceptible. Probably sound-proofed. But it was there, and Roadhog didn’t hesitate to slam the end of his hook into the trunk’s lock. He wedged it in good and then <em>ripped</em> it out, taking a whole chunk of the trunk with it.</p><p>“Fucking hell, Roadie, took ya long enough!” Junkrat shouted, face absolutely glowing with delight.</p><p>Roadhog looked down at him, hogtied (ha) in the back of the limo, and smiled.</p><p>“Hey, fucker,” he grunted, and then he slumped against the side of the limo.</p><p>“Roadie? Hey! Roadie!” Junkrat’s voice sounded far away.</p><p>Aw, shit, was he really this weak? One shot to the shoulder and he couldn’t stay conscious? He was losing his goddamn touch.</p><p>Aw, well, Junkrat was safe now. Didn’t really matter what happened after.</p><p>It was a comforting thought to pass out to.</p>
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<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Love, or Something Like It</h2></a>
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    <p>His shoulder hurt like a <em>bitch</em>. Damn, his whole body hurt. His lungs felt heavy and oxygen deprived, too, but that was nothing new.</p><p>Roadhog blinked awake. He tried to roll onto his side—it was always a little harder to breathe on his back—but his shoulder screamed in protest, so he stayed where he was and just about hacked up a lung.</p><p>When the coughs subsided he managed to sit up, and saw a wide-eyed Junkrat sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed, staring at him.</p><p>“You good, Roadie?” he asked.</p><p>“Good enough,” Roadhog wheezed.</p><p>“You need some hogdrogen? Getting kinda low, but—”</p><p>Roadhog waved his good arm vaguely. He’d take some later. He <em>was</em> running low. He’d need to stock up again, and—</p><p>“Where the fuck are we?” Roadhog rasped, suddenly looking around the place. Looked like some kind of dingy motel. They’d been staying in pretty swanky places lately, when they bothered with hotels, and this place was almost nostalgic.</p><p>Junkrat shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Good thing you dropped your hook in the trunk when you passed out, mate, but it still took me almost an hour to wear down those stupid ropes with it. What d’ya think they were made outta, anyways? Couldn’t do shit to them with my arm. Anyways. Finally got myself outta those ropes and had to haul your meaty body all the way back to the sidecar, and then when I finally found someplace with a bed I had to shell out the big bucks to keep the lady at the front desk quiet about the giant bleedin’ body I was hauling upstairs. Got you all good and patched up, though!”</p><p>Junkrat nodded proudly at Roadhog’s shoulder, and Roadhog glanced down to realize that Junkrat <em>had</em> patched him up good. The bandaging on his shoulder looked clean and well-applied. Junkrat had years of practice at stitching up and bandaging wounds—usually his own—but it was always a surprise to see something so clean and orderly come from Junkrat’s twitching hands.</p><p>“Don’t know why you even bothered,” Roadhog huffed, resting his head against his chest. His mask was tossed off somewhere to the side, and he wanted it back, even though the air in here was pretty clear.</p><p>Junkrat cocked his head. “Bothered with that? Paying off the front desk lady? Coulda just killed her, I guess, but I didn’t wanna cause a whole scene when you were bleeding out on me, mate.”</p><p>Roadhog laughed, though it came out as more of a wheezing cough. “You didn’t wanna cause a scene? That’s a first.”</p><p>“What can I say, Roadie, you’ve made me a changed man,” Junkrat said, swooning against Roadhog’s side.</p><p>Roadhog shrugged his good shoulder, shoving Junkrat aside. “But nah, I meant why’d you bother hauling me all the way here? Woulda probably been fine if you’d just left me in the middle of the road for a couple hours. I’ve survived worse.”</p><p>“Ya didn’t look like you’d be fine,” Junkrat said, narrowing his eyes at Roadhog.</p><p>Roadhog shrugged, then regretted it immediately as it pulled on his wounded shoulder. “Then I woulda died out there, saved you the trouble.”</p><p>“What the fuck are you talking about, mate?” Junkrat yelped. He jumped off the bed and started pacing in frantic little circles around the motel room. “You came to save me from my own stupid mistake and then ya want me to just let you die for it?”</p><p>Roadhog shrugged again, this time with just his good shoulder. “I’m gonna go out someday, mate. You promise me you’ll leave me behind if you ever need to, okay?”</p><p>Junkrat’s frantic pacing stopped. He turned on Roadhog like a feral thing, a wild look in his eyes that Roadhog rarely saw turned his way. He braced himself, somehow knowing what was coming before it even happened. And then Junkrat <em>launched</em> himself at Roadhog, shoving him down onto the bed with more strength than someone so skinny should have. He pressed his right arm, sharp and metallic, against Roadhog’s neck, and Roadhog wheezed. He could have thrown Junkrat off if he really wanted to, injured and out of breath or not, but he knew he deserved whatever Junkrat wanted to dish him.</p><p>“You shut the fuck up, Roadie!” Junkrat shouted, his face so close to Roadhog’s he was spitting on him. “You take that back or I blow us <em>both</em> to high heaven right now!”</p><p>“It’s… true…” Roadhog huffed around Junkrat’s choking grip. “I won’t… outlive you… Rat…”</p><p>“Fuck that! We got out together or not at all!” Junkrat shouted. His eyes danced with fire, with the spark of the bomb he carried around in his soul. Fuck, he really meant it, didn’t he?</p><p>“I’m supposed… to protect you…” Roadhog wheezed.</p><p>“You can’t protect me if you’re dead, mate.”</p><p>Something wet and warm rolled down Roadhog’s face. For a second he thought he was bleeding—god, had he busted more than just his shoulder?—and then he realized it was tears.</p><p>Mako couldn’t remember the last time that he’d cried.</p><p>“Thought I lost you, Rat,” Roadhog whispered, and now it was the tears choking him, not Junkrat. Junkrat had loosened his grip, his arm no longer pressed to Roadhog’ throat, but he was still lying on top of him, a reassuring weight pressed against the length of his body.</p><p>For a second Junkrat looked shocked, didn’t seem to know what to do. He’d probably never seen Roadhog cry. Hell, Roadhog hadn’t even been sure he still <em>could</em> cry.</p><p>And then Junkrat pressed his forehead against Roadhog’s, a gesture somehow more primal and intimate than a kiss.</p><p>“Can’t get rid of me that easy, Roadie,” Junkrat said, and maybe he was crying, too. It was hard to tell where all those warm tears were coming from.</p><p>They fell asleep like that, blubbering and exhausted. When Roadhog woke up again, Junkrat wasn’t lying on top of him anymore, and the lack of that warm presence against him made him panic for a second.</p><p>Then he heard the rattling, screeching sound that he’d come to recognize as Pork throwing himself against the bars of his cage, and he looked up to see Junkrat crouched over the cage, dangling some kind of greasy, cheesy snack above it.</p><p>Junkrat caught Roadhog’s eye and grinned. “Look, he likes ’em!” he said, and dropped the snack into the cage. Pork fell on it like a starved thing. God, Roadhog hoped it wasn’t rabid.</p><p>“Thanks for bringing him with you, mate,” Junkrat said, patting the side of the cage with his metal hand. The clang of metal on metal grated at Roadhog’s ears, but he gave Junkrat a rare smile.</p><p>“Named ’im Pork,” Roadhog said.</p><p>Junkrat’s eyes widened. “Fucking hell, that’s perfect! Pork and Hoggy, the only men I’ll ever love!”</p><p>Junkrat cackled wildly, and Roadhog should have taken offense at being on the same level as a garbage rat in Junkrat’s heart, but he was still feeling sappy.</p><p>What was it about this skinny spark of a guy that made Roadhog’s cold, black heart feel warm and young? It didn’t matter how slow and sick and tired Roadhog was. Junkrat kept him racing forward every day, gave him something to care about in this hopeless world.</p><p>“Love you, too, Rat,” Roadhog said. And hell, if Junkrat wanted him to stay alive for as long as he could, he’d just have to stick around.</p>
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